Santé Wellness
Most PT practices deliver exceptional care and a forgettable digital experience. Santé was designed to close that gap.
Client Project
Mobile App
Lead Product Designer
Web · iOS
April 2026 - Ongoing
A Practitioner's Vision for Better Care
Santé Wellness is the vision of Dr. Roger, a physical therapist who believes that exceptional care shouldn't stop when the session ends. He came to me with a concept: a client-facing app built around proactive health, evidence-based movement science, and a deeply personal provider relationship. My role was to take that vision and design the experience: a mobile platform that extends care beyond the appointment through home programs, progress tracking, provider messaging, and evidence-based education.
Problem
Physical therapy works. The evidence is strong, the outcomes are real, and for clients who engage fully - completing their home programs, maintaining contact with their provider between sessions, understanding why each exercise exists - the results are measurably better. The problem is that most PT practices make full engagement almost impossible. The tools are built for the provider, not the person receiving care.
Santé is a different kind of practice. It sits at the intersection of movement science and whole-person wellness - a concierge model with a philosophy centered on proactive health and longevity rather than reactive injury treatment. The clientele are active adults, professionals, and athletes who invest seriously in their health and expect their experiences to reflect that care.
The gap this project addresses: there is no client-facing digital product that matches the quality of the care itself. Clients book by text, receive PDF home programs, and have no structured way to track progress, communicate asynchronously with their provider, or engage with the educational content that makes Santé's approach to movement medicine distinct.
A client in a concierge PT practice expects more than a scheduling confirmation. They expect a product that treats their time, their progress, and their relationship with their provider with the same intentionality the practice brings to every session. Santé is that product - designed from the client's perspective outward, not from the practice management stack inward.
The Market Opportunity
Physical therapy and movement medicine occupy an unusual space in healthcare: outcomes are highly personal and embodied, the client-provider relationship is close and longitudinal, and the actual work happens largely off-screen - in a clinic, at home, or in motion. Yet the digital tools most PT practices rely on were designed for billing and scheduling, not for the therapeutic relationship itself.
The dominant tools in the PT space - WebPT, Jane, Cliniko - are practice management platforms built for providers. The patient-facing surface is minimal: appointment confirmations, intake forms, maybe a PDF. There is no progress visibility, no content layer, no structured way for a client to stay engaged with their care between sessions.
Other parts of the wellness industry have moved in a different direction. Brands like Equinox and Eight Sleep have built experiences that feel personalized, progress-oriented, and designed with the user's goals at the center. But none of them operate in the evidence-based physical therapy space. There is a real gap between the clinical rigor of PT and the experience quality that health-conscious clients now expect from the tools they use.
Santé is designed to close that gap - to bring the same care and attention to the digital experience that the practice brings to every session.
Research & Discovery
My research process focused on two questions: what does a Santé client actually need between sessions, and what does the competitive landscape reveal about where the gaps are? I approached this by mapping the existing PT and wellness app ecosystem, seeing how a user can prioritize proactive health and use multiple tools to manage it, and looking closely at how brands outside healthcare have solved the problem of sustaining a personal, high-touch relationship through a digital product.
The Santé client is not someone who needs to be convinced to prioritize health - they already have. They are active adults, professionals, and athletes who approach wellness proactively and invest time and intention into their care. They expect personalization, they respond to evidence and expertise, and they are more likely to disengage from a tool that feels generic than to push through friction out of necessity. The bar for the product experience is set by the other well-designed tools in their life - not by the average healthcare app.
01
Practice management tools (WebPT, Jane, Cliniko)
Built for providers, not patients. The patient-facing surface is minimal - appointment confirmations, intake forms. No content, no progress visibility, no relationship layer between sessions.
02
Home exercise apps (PhysiTrack, HEP2go, Kaia Health)
More patient-forward, but clinical in aesthetics and tone. Designed for adherence tracking and documentation - not for an experience that feels as considered as the care itself.
03
Wellness brands (Equinox+, Eight Sleep, Whoop)
Set the right reference point for experience quality - personalized, progress-oriented, designed with the user at the center. But none operate in the evidence-based PT space. The gap between their UX and the PT category is the opportunity.
04
Telehealth platforms (Hims & Hers, Teladoc, Maven)
Have solved for async care delivery and in-app messaging. But they skew toward acute, transactional care. The longitudinal, relationship-driven PT model needs different UX patterns - continuity, not episode management.
The research pointed toward a clear product north star: Santé should feel like what would happen if a deeply considered wellness practice and a product team who actually understood movement medicine built something together. Not a clinical tool with a nice coat of paint - an experience genuinely built around the client's relationship with their care.
Visibility into their care plan and progress over time. A direct, asynchronous line to their provider. Access to educational content that reinforces their treatment. Frictionless booking across three session modalities. A sense of arc - where they started, where they are, where they're going.
Generic healthcare UI patterns that signal "medical portal." Notification-driven engagement mechanics that cheapen the brand. Complexity that requires the client to manage their own experience. Anything that creates friction between the client and the provider relationship that is the core of the service.
Design Principles
Before moving into screen design, I defined the principles that would govern every product decision. These aren't values statements - they're constraints I used to make hard calls about what to include, what to cut, and how to handle the tensions that come up when a carefully crafted care experience meets the practical demands of a digital product.
The relationship is the product
In physical therapy, the provider relationship is the therapeutic mechanism. Every feature in the app exists to extend that relationship between sessions - not to replace it or reduce it to a transaction. Messaging, care plan visibility, and progress tracking are all relational tools first.
Evidence, not noise
Santé's philosophy is movement science made accessible - educational, evidence-based, never fear-mongering. The content layer of the app must reflect this. The Movement Lab format belongs in the product, not just on social media. Content that doesn't serve the client's care or education doesn't belong here.
Restraint is a design decision
No gamification. No badge counts on every tab. No push notification strategy designed for engagement. A Santé client is investing in their health, not competing in a streak. The product earns trust through what it doesn't do - and through a visual and interaction quality that reflects the same care as the practice itself.
Design for the arc, not the moment
PT care is longitudinal - an 8-week plan, a progression of milestones, a journey from baseline to outcome. The product should make that arc visible at every touchpoint. A client should always know where they started, where they are now, and what's ahead.
The tension between visual warmth and clinical function showed up constantly. Healthcare UI typically trends toward neutral and accessible - because clarity and trust matter in health contexts. Experience-forward UI trends toward atmospheric and considered. I resolved this by being intentional about where each register lives: the dark forest headers and editorial type carry the brand's warmth and character; the care plan milestones and messaging threads carry precision and clinical clarity. The two registers coexist because they live in different parts of the screen - not because they're blended into a compromise that serves neither.
Product Strategy & Scope
Santé is a concept brand built around a clear and specific vision: a movement-centered wellness practice that blends evidence-based physical therapy, performance coaching, and recovery - delivered through a personal, concierge-style model that could eventually grow into a full clinic and digital platform. The product had to be designed with that vision in mind from the start.
That created a real scoping challenge. A V1 app for a practice just launching looks very different from the full platform the vision points toward. Design too small and the product doesn't reflect the ambition of the brand. Design too large and you build something with no clear starting point. My framing: design the app as a vision-forward product - one that establishes the full experience arc while being honest about what would ship first versus what scales in. Features like the care plan tracker and wellness score are included as first-class citizens because they're central to what makes Santé distinct - not bolted on later as afterthoughts.
Session Booking
Central to the practice model. Three modalities: in-clinic, video, and mobile PT. Direct booking without friction.
Home Program Builder
The provider-assigned exercise program needs to live in the app - not as a PDF attachment. Clients need to see their exercises, watch demos, log sets, and track completion against a care plan.
Exercise Video Library
Video demonstrations with coaching cues are how clients learn correct movement patterns independently. This is core to safe home program execution and reduces the need for correction at sessions.
Progress & Data Tracking
Adherence visibility, milestone progression, and metric tracking (mobility gains, session count, program completion) give clients a sense of arc across their care journey. High-leverage for engagement and outcomes.
Provider Messaging
The PT relationship is longitudinal and personal. Async messaging with resource sharing (updated programs, articles) is a baseline expectation at this level of care.
Telehealth / Check-in
Quick video check-ins between sessions - for form questions, pain concerns, or program modifications - are a key part of the concierge care model. Structured in-app so it doesn't default to text.
Education & Content Hub
The Movement Lab series is central to the brand's identity and client experience. They belong in the product, not just on social media.
Independent Platform / Memberships
Long-term vision: users who aren't direct clients can access guided programs, educational content, and wellness tools independently. Requires subscription infrastructure and content at scale.
Group Classes & Live Sessions
Part of the broader ecosystem vision. Requires scheduling infrastructure and a different delivery model than one-on-one care.
The Space Between Sessions
With the principles defined and scope set, I moved into screen design. Every decision was held against the same test: does this feel like a product that could only come from Santé, or does it feel like a wellness app template? The difference is in the details - type scale, color application, information density, and the moments where the practice's character shows through in UI patterns and microcopy.
Because this is a concept project, I can't point to shipped metrics. What I can speak to is how the design decisions hold up against the core problem - and where real-world validation would be essential before building.
The wellness score is the design decision I'd want to test first. A numerical representation of overall health is a high-stakes UI pattern - it needs to feel motivating rather than anxiety-inducing, and the algorithm behind it needs to be transparent enough for a sophisticated client to trust. I'd want to validate both the concept and the presentation with real users before committing to it as a home screen anchor.
The dual-mode tension between the content platform (Explore) and the care tool (Home, Book, Messages) would also need user research to validate. The navigation architecture resolves this through clear separation, but whether clients experience the two modes as one coherent product or as two separate mental models is a question the design can't answer on its own.
This project allowed me to design for a user who is simultaneously a healthcare patient and someone who brings high expectations to the tools they use - and those two identities create genuine tension in almost every product decision. The learnings that came out of navigating that tension feel broadly applicable to any healthcare product that operates outside the insurance-driven, clinically-neutral default.